In a storage environment where data is stored on a volume, there are times when a complete secure delete of the data may be desired. Within existing storage disks, because the data is stored on the volume in tracks, to erase these tracks, an I/O operation must be performed to each track of the device to overwrite the existing data. As a further complication to the secure delete process, due to the nature of magnetic recording, it may be possible to access previously-written data on a disk even though it may have been written over more than once. Therefore, to prevent the possibility of accessing previously-written data, current secure delete methods write random patterns on the physical media many times in order to ensure that no previously-written data is accessible.